An instant messaging (IM) application is often used to exchange and process information in real time over the Internet. In particular, an IM application allows two or more users of different terminals to communicate with each other instantly by exchanging text messages, documents, voice and video clips over an available communication network. Examples of popular IM applications include MiChat, YY voice, QQ, WeChat, Baidu Hi, Sina UC, Alitalk, Fetion, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and Skype Messenger.
In addition to the communication function, some IM applications also provide public platforms, support friend circles, and push messages to their users. For example, in WeChat, a user may add a friend by using a built-in function, WeChat Shake, by searching for a specific number, by searching for a user in the vicinity, or by scanning a two-dimension quick reference (QR) code, and thereby, set up a friend circle among his or her added friends. The user may also subscribe to a public platform managed by a webmaster, and receive information and updates from posted by the webmaster on the public platform. The user may also post information in his or her friend circle or on the public platform.
A public platform provided by an IM application allows a user (an individual or a company) who normally registers the public platform under a public account to share textual, video and audio information with a specific group of people. The specific group of people is subscribers of this public platform which is normally managed by a webmaster. These subscribers may send inquiries and requests on the public platforms, and for the sake of efficiency, some IM applications provide a keyword based automatic reply (auto-reply) function to reply to these inquires and requests automatically. For example, in WeChat, the user of the public account may specify a specific auto-reply message according to a keyword, and this specific auto-reply message may includes texts, pictures, audios and/or videos associated with the keyword. Further, in a specific example, a keyword of “company profile” is correlated with a company profile website, and according to such a correlation, the auto-reply message associated with the keyword of “company profile” includes a link to the company profile website. When a subscriber sends a message containing the keyword of “company profile” to this public account, the public account will automatically reply to the subscriber a message containing the link to the company profile website.
There are two existing methods in prior art for generating an auto-reply message based on a specific keyword. The first method involves online editing using a keyword based auto-reply editor that is embedded in an IM based public platform. The auto-reply editor includes a keyword box, and a message body box in which a user manually fills the specific keyword and the content of the auto-reply message correlated with the specific keyword, respectively. During this course of creating the keyword based auto-reply message, the user has to manually edit the message body, upload certain IM message materials (e.g., pictures, audio or video files), and/or associate the auto-reply message with content items of a webpage. After the auto-reply message is composed for the specific keyword, it is stored in association with the corresponding public account by a server that manages the IM messaging application.
The second method of generating a keyword based auto-reply message involves importing a data file that is created according to a specific format. This data file includes a keyword and content of the auto-reply message correlated with the keyword, which are manually arranged in the data file according to the specific format. During the course of creating this keyword based auto-reply message, the user also has to manually edit the message body, enter links to certain IM message materials (e.g., pictures, audio or video files), and/or associate the auto-reply message with a webpage. This data file is also stored in association with the corresponding public account by a server that manages the IM messaging application, and may be extracted for generating the auto-reply message automatically in response to a subscriber's inquiry or request containing the specific keyword.
Despite their acceptable performance, the above two methods are plagued with some technical problems. Specifically, each auto-reply message of a public account has to be created in a manual manner, and corresponding manual operations are normally complicated, resulting in low operating efficiency and low accuracy rates. When an auto-reply message needs to be changed, (e.g., when the above-mentioned company profile webpage changes), the auto-reply message associated with a specific keyword has to be edited manually to reflect the change. Thus, maintenance of the correlation between the keyword and the auto-reply message is complicated, which demands an intensive labor and results in a relatively high labor cost.